Posts tagged “notch”

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time. No, neither have I. Infiniminer was a team-based game in which players competed to collect more minerals than their opponents in a blocky, randomly-generated cavern. But during development in 2009 the source code was leaked by hackers. In the wake of new modified…

Minecraft gets more popular every day, but we don't talk about it much anymore. To find out what the game is like in 2014, we asked Duncan Geere to impart his wisdom. The result is a three-part series which will run across this week. To start, a look at the game's modding scene. It's been an eventful few years for Markus Persson, the Swedish programmer…

Edit #2: updated to include Microsoft's video statement. Edit: updated to include Notch's statement regarding the sale and his own departure from Mojang. Speculation occasionally has a basis in fact. A few minutes ago, Minecraft creators Mojang confirmed that Microsoft's purchase of the company is going ahead. The price? Two and a half billion dollars. The reason? As you might already know, Notch is the…

You may have heard that changes are afoot in the world of Minecraft. You may also have heard that nothing much is changing at all. The story of monetisation, community and servers has led to plenty of discussion and rhetoric from various sides, and the issues at the heart of the situation haven't always been clear. I spent some time last week looking into the…

Edit: Please note that we've updated and expanded this post to lend more clarity to what is a complicated and still-changing issue. Yesterday we posted about the outraged reaction to Minecraft's new no-charging-for-gameplay-affecting items policy and, in turn, Notch's response to that. That initial post was pretty dismissive of the anger because it didn't really seem like Mojang had changed a whole lot. The newly…

Did you hear the news? You can't sell items that affect gameplay anymore in Minecraft. If your server does that, you have been bad and will probably be shot to death by the police after a high-octane car chase full of cool lighting and witty quips. You are, however, still allowed to accept donations to keep your server up and running, promote advertising/in-game sponsorship, and…

It's only been a month and a half since I wrote my mega-preview of Age Of Wonders III and spending around fifteen hours with a review copy of the game hasn’t done a great deal to change my mind about its many merits. It hasn’t extended its tendrils to tickle any deeper fancies either, although I’ll concede that the world is a little weirder and…

Looks like All of Humanity wasn't the only one surprised by Facebook's $2 billion purchase of Oculus Rift. Minecraft creator Markus Persson was equally taken aback, and not in a good way. His solution? Cancel plans for an Oculus-Rift-specific version of Minecraft on the spot. He first made the announcement on Twitter, only explaining that he finds Facebook "creepy." Now, though, he's elaborated a fair…

Actually, that should be "Footage Of Age Wonders III's Rogue Leader". I was trying to be cool, and now I've backed myself into a corner. Help me out by shaking your monitor around as you watch this short trailer for the fantasy strategy game's Rogue class. It will make it appear as if the footage was roguishly taken.

Edit: Notch has clarified his intentions for the immediate future in blog-wise fashion: Last week, I participated in the 7dfps and made a hectic shooter greatly inspired by Doom, called Shambles, and it was some of the most fun programming I’ve done in many months. This is what I want to do. I want to do smaller games that can fail. I want to experiment…

Last time Notch competed in a Ludum Dare game jam, he made Minecraft again, only tiny. Also Zelda. And this time around? He, er, didn't throw his unmistakable hat into the ring at all. But he coincidentally released a game that practically fits the theme - minimalism - to a tee on the same day the competition wound down, so close enough. Titled Drop, this…

REPORTER: "Mr Notch, you just made several quadrillion dollars and simulated a nigh-infinite terrestrial expanse where nearly anything is possible via the wide-eyed machinations of human ingenuity. What are you going to do now?" NOTCH: "I'm going to Disneyland space! Only it's more of a space-themed hacker heaven. But it's also kinda like Firefly somehow. Or something." EVERYONE EVER: "Ooo! Wait, huh?" Seeing as Minecraft is basically…

The news funnel at Eurogamer has become all clogged up with the surprise news that Minecraft-enrichened indie dev Notch is the mysterious benefactor behind Age Of Wonders III. Lennart Sas, managing director of developers Triumph (who previously made Overlord) told EG: "We noticed Minecraft's random title-screen blurb mentioned Age of Wonders, so I thought what the heck and I sent Notch an email." This, as…

How we had hoped to see Pat Garratt enjoying a hearty feast of broiled denim and shallow-fried zipper, but it was not to be. The editor of VG247 last year swore to eat his own trousers in the event Minecraft man Markus 'Notch' Persson made good on his talk of funding a sequel to Double Fine's Psychonauts. Alas, Persson has recently confessed that such a…

Did you know that Notch existed before Minecraft? Not only that, he breathed and ate food and made games and everything! Just like a real flesh being. But when he decided to pursue Minecraft's blocky green pastures, his previous claim to fame, sandbox fantasy MMO wonderland Wurm Online, didn't miss a beat. And by that, I mean it stayed in beta for six years and…

Yesterday, we ran the first part of my chat with Minecraft creator and needer-of-no-introductions Notch, wherein we largely talked about life after Minecraft and what he's been up to recently. But there's more to this world than Minecraft (at least, until we discover our entire world is actually a block-by-block Minecraft reconstruction of the real world), so today, we're forging ahead into the future. And…

Notch is Minecraft. Minecraft is Notch. A year ago, those statements might have been true to some extent, but not anymore. The man behind the most pervasive invention since the wheel (which he achieved by simply putting the corners back onto the wheel) hung up his pick axe late last year. That does not mean, however, that he's escaped from the shadow of the monolith…

Information about Notch's recently announced space exploration game 0x10c has been slowly emerging from stasis. The fine fellow tweeted a screenshot of the forthcoming game, showcasing "Flashlights, for spelunking and fixing broken ships!" featuring two spacemen (who resemble the Soldier from that low-res TF2 model pack quite a bit, come to think of it. Notch stealing content! Proof that Notch is more evil than EA!)…

Markus Persson's put a name and a description to the Elite-inspired space game he's been teasing Twitter about recently, and it's pretty obvious this is going to be a full-fat endeavour rather than another micro-project. 0x10c is the game's name, how it's pronounced is anyone's guess but I'm gonna go with 'Derek'. It's a reference to a programming error that caused space travellers (from an…

I think I've found serenity: Minecraft creator Notch is slowly thumbing through the Big Book Of Awesome Space Things while he comes up with his next game. He told the handsome devils over at PC Gamer that he's pondering a sandbox style Elite game, "except done right". To clarify, he's not saying Elite is rubbish and broken, but that no-one's ever done it as well…